SCIENCE AND SOCIETY 5 



botanist is a man who spends his Hfe over a microscope, 

 i.e. a man who goes on examining and describing 

 microscopically minute organisms, or else microscopic- 

 ally minute details of large organisms. Although 

 apparently different, the activity of both is essentially 

 analogous : the only difference between them lies in 

 the scale of their operations. While the one observes 

 with the naked eye, the other uses the lens or the 

 microscope ; but both do no more than observe and 

 describe, and the description of a fungus or of a water- 

 weed does not differ from the description of a grass or 

 of a tree. The one and the other forget that the chief 

 object of the scientist is not to describe but to explain 

 and command Nature ; his method must not be that of 

 a passive observer, but rather that of an active experi- 

 menter ; he must engage in strife with Nature, and 

 by the power of his mind extort from her answers 

 to his questions, so that he may master and sub- 

 ordinate her at will, provoke or arrest the phenomena 

 of Hfe, direct or vary them. Of course, among the 

 representatives of the exclusively morphological, or 

 descriptive, tendency there have been powerful minds, 

 who have thrown light upon the mass of accumu- 

 lated material and made it live — a little further on we 

 shall even study an illustration of this — but on the 

 whole their energies have been spent upon conceptions 

 inaccessible to the uninitiated, and therefore they have 

 not been able to excite any general interest. The fine 

 simplicity of some morphological laws, the harmony of 

 natural systems of classification which stand as wonder- 

 ful memorials to the power of the human mind, all this 

 is lost to those who are without the knowledge of the 

 details necessary to the understanding of it. 



It is therefore evident that up to the present time 

 botany has been developing mostly along the lines 

 which least interest the public. As we have already 

 seen, the reason lies partly in the historical course of 



